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Just as a short follow up to my last post, I want to show you something I uncovered.
Estée Lauder has done something very good: they hired popular fashion/beauty/foodie/lifestyle blogger Emily Schuman of Cupcakes and Cashmere to do some videos for them. This is interesting to me because ,although I love Emily's stuff and she's obviously VERY good at what she does and promoting herself, I don't know her as a video blogger at all. In fact, her tutorials and most of her content is photographic. But Estée Lauder took the risk and hired her to do videos anyway. So, how did that go for them?

Take a look at their top most viewed videos. The top 3 are those one-way type ads made for television that shouldn't really be on YouTube, but are....and they are in those top spots because they are paid for:

Let's say that on average, it's about $0.10/view, so to get these views, Estée Lauder would have spent around $60,000. However, when it comes to the Cupcakes and Cashmere posts, which are in the top 20 most viewed on their channel (though have less than half of the views of the top 3), there was no ad spend. Zero:

Now, I'm not sure what they've paid Emily to be a brand spokesmodel, but her ability to leverage her own community and hard work to create views for the brand is very effective and, not only are there organic views, but the comments, likes and general engagement for Emily's videos are way better. This is a case in which Estée Lauder should take these learnings and shift more of their money and attention into producing more content with Emily (and others like her). Of course Emily needs to remain brand neutral on some level to keep her audience, but this provides a good case study for engaging with bloggers who have built a great community instead of merely paying for views.

Lancome does a similarly great job with Michelle Phan as their brand advocate, but I should add that I work with them as a client, so I wanted to avoid nepotism. ;)

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A piece of feedback for Estée Lauder? That highly branded channel landing page is confusing, unnecessary and loads slowly. If you are thinking of a redesign, think about user experience and needs over artsy-ness.